Ooh! An App To Identify Birds!

Now THIS is useful!:

The newly developed ‘Merlin Bird Photo ID’ acts as your own personal ornithologist. So how does it work? All you need to do is take a snap of a bird you're keen to identify, upload it to the website and let Merlin do the rest.

The website, brought to you by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Visipedia research project, can recognize 400 of the most commonly found birds in the United States and Canada. Once users have taken a photo, they draw a box around the bird, click its bill, eye and tail and tell Merlin where and when the photo was taken.

“It gets the bird right in the top three results about 90 percent of the time, and it’s designed to keep improving the more people use it,” said Jessie Barry, the Merlin Project Leader, in a statement. “That’s truly amazing, considering that the computer vision community started working on the challenge of bird identification only a few years ago.”